Rolling thoughts about the press, the Web, and political assassination.

The Wisdom of Twitter If my Twitter stream is smarter than yours, it's only because I follow @walterkirn. Here are the sharpest tweets I read this afternoon. By custom, retweets aren't supposed to be taken as endorsements, but I endorse these.

@jaketapper anyone can be first with wrong information. —Jan. 8, 7:20 p.m.

@weareyourfek* Today, John Boehner, is when you cry. —Jan. 8, 4:45 p.m.

—Posted Jan. 8, 7:42 p.m.

The Tucson Memory HoleThe rush to delete embarrassing, incriminating, or inconvenient Web pages in the wake of breaking news—such as the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, Ariz., today—makes no sense.

Already, the alleged shooter's MySpace page has disappeared, and SarahPAC has removed the controversial page that put "crosshairs" on congressional districts held by Democratic Party incumbents that the PAC was targeting. [Correction: I relied on an erroneous and now retracted report that SarahPAC took down the crosshairs map. I am responsible for the mistake in my copy. Instead of rewriting the piece, I'm leaving it stand. You are free to chuckle at the irony.]As I write, the YouTube pages attributed to the alleged shooter are still up, but I wouldn't be surprised if they get grounded.

But as the links above show, practically anything posted on the Web can be retrieved and reposted by resourceful Web monkeys. So what is served by tossing images and words into the memory hole? In the case of SarahPAC, [See correction above.]its proprietors appear to be making some sort of backhanded confession of guilt by dumping the page. That confession is unwarranted in my view: Anyone who can be persuaded by a political metaphor to actually put a bullet into somebody's brain can't have much of a tether to reality, so why delete?

The MySpace deletion is even weirder. Is being an alleged shooter a violation of MySpace's terms of service? By taking the page down, is MySpace implying that until the shooting spree started, it endorsed the poster's views? Of course not. MySpace, Facebook, and all other social media pages are in the business of supplying paper and pen to those who wish to publish. The fact that they provide the publishing tools to people who end up shooting people doesn't make them contributors to murder if the writer wasn't publishing violent threats. And the alleged shooter doesn't appear to have threatened mayhem on his pages. So what's MySpace afraid of here?

Similarly, after white supremacist James von Brunn * opened fire on security guards at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2009, killing one, numerous Web sites scrambled to delete his online scribblings. Quickly, many of the erased pages were salvaged and republished.

The rush to delete reveals a kind of magical thinking at work, standing as a gesture toward the time when our paper-based publishing culture made it possible to stamp out information. But the modern bell can not be unrung. I understand the urge to distance oneself from a horror, but the frantic expunging of Web content we're witnessing today only binds the erasers closer to the crime.